What unemployment taught me about dual-career parenting
I’ve made a point to not mention this over the last several months, because I try to keep this site (mostly) professional. But — of course — personal and professional matters interfere with one another. We are all working on the same 24 hours per day, no matter how it gets sliced up.
For the last year, our time management has gotten really rocky as we’ve gone through personal and professional rollercoaster. My spouse’s working conditions deteriorated so much that it became obviously better for her to quit than remain in an intolerable situation. She was on the job market for several months before she started in a great new position.
I’m not saying this just to tell the story. I learned something out of it which I’d like to share. The changes in work, and particularly the shift in flexibility that we had with our work schedules, changed how we allocated labor at home. While I’ve always appreciated that finding equitable division of labor isn’t easy, this experience showed me how these arrangements are so fragile.
I wrote the story for Chronicle Vitae, so you can read it over there: